Wills72455

Car 1972 Cutlass S 455 w Turbo 400, column shift

Long story short I recently had my transmission pan off to replace the filter/gasket and figured I ought to do the shift shaft seal since it was leaking as well. Pretty easy overall, I was a BMW/Mercedes tech for years, except I ended up breaking the job up over a couple of days.

At this point it is all back together in what I am assuming is correct order. The shift linkage seems to be out of adjustment, when I drop it into reverse I have to go just a hair past the detent and then let the shifter "pop" back up into position to get the gear, same for neutral drive etc. I tried adjusting the linkage with no real success. The linkage was a little off prior to my repair but not as much as now.

The only other piece of info that causes me to second guess myself is that when I was putting the thing back together I had an "extra" part I couldn't remember dealing with. It was about a 1.5in long metal cylinder that I put between the valve body and the filter as a spacer. I am ASSUMING that this is the correct placement as I cannot imagine that thing has a place in the valve body based on what I saw. We all know what they say about assumption though...

Any advice, finger pointing, mocking, or stern lectures will be appreciated if they help point me in the right direction. I'm guessing I may need to tinker with the linkage adjustment more, or that it may not be correctly assembled. Regardless, thanks for reading!

Wills72455

I like closure, so here's the solution to the problem; I had a friend help me with adjusting the linkage and things are now working correctly. For me finding neutral worked well, it seemed like using Park, Reverse or First as a base left too much possible range of adjustment. On my own the shifter was moving when I adjusted the linkage, not much but enough to throw things off.